Berhane Yemane is the chief executive officer of Noel Information Technology Solutions, a company providing a wide range of business solutions and support services. He has almost two decades of experience in professional consulting and management of Oracle Financial Applications implementation and Client/Server applications design, development and deployment. He spoke to hilary okeke on UniSS application designed to automate university administration.
University Student System Application
University Student System (UniSS) is based on Oracle developers’ suite, which enables universities to accomplish their critical missions in today’s rapidly changing educational environment. It is a single source student system designed to provide a solution for staff responsible for school administration, student enrolment, financial and business services of educational institutions. UniSS application is designed for and developed using the latest industry standard Oracle 10g developer suite which can adapt to increased demands, can easily be customized to fit each client’s requirements and is not wholly affected by a single application failure.
The software functions can be compared to leading software companies’ applications’ functions such as maintaining students’ records, calculating GPAs, and school’s general information; and is by far the most cost effective application to customize, implement and support. The Access Control section of the application contains security at multi-levels, for the authorization of users who are allowed access to data, by maintaining users’ access levels to the application and creating audit trail of all changes made to student’s record to include, but not limited to user ID and date stamp.
UniSS is developed based on the knowledge of African educational institutions, the understanding of the technology and IT infrastructure of the continent. All functions, forms and reports are tailored to suit the educational requirements of each institution. As an Oracle based application, it is designed as packaged modules. Functions such as internal processes, interface with third-party software, federal or state government’s grants and scholarships, as well as legal requirements are all included in the application modules. These functions are not relevant to customers outside the western countries’ educational institutions but they are included in the pricing of the application module. Implementation of Oracle modules costs an average $15-20 million but implementation of the UniSS application costs less than half of that.
Project Implementation
First, we conduct feasibility study and document the university structure; do a feasibility study of the university’s IT infrastructure; recommend to the university the Oracle software and hardware, as well as IT infrastructure required to run the UniSS application; and modify UniSS application accordingly by designing customized forms, reports and processes. We then gather and prepare students’ and university’s data, create interface programmes to enter the data into the UniSS database, deploy the application in a “development” environment; conduct user training along with Oracle training; conduct rigorous unit tests of the application and data clean up in preparation for production environment deployment. Deployment of UniSS application in a “production” environment is the last stage of the implementation process.
Availability to Nigeria Market
My trip to this country is basically to explore the Nigerian market. I got here about a week ago and I have since spoken to interested people. Before the end of this week, I may speak to the management of the Lagos State University. We are trying to promote this university automation system, and we will keep doing that till people begin to appreciate what they stand to gain.
Security and Integrity of the Application
Although Web-based, this is an internal application system – an application for university wide administration. It is not an Internet or online based application where people can log in; it is internal. So you have to be an authorised university administrator or personnel to gain access to the application. Of course, if the university wants the students to access their records or they want them to generate reports; they would have the online arm of it so that the students can do so. That is negotiable with the university.
The universities stand to gain a lot from this application. First, they can save money and reduce paper work during admissions and in general administration of the school, and also save time. Any organisation replacing its manual system with automated system has a lot to gain on the long term in terms of money, efficiency and data security. For a student requesting for transcript, that can be generated in a matter of seconds; all that is needed to be done is query the student data and just print the transcript, with the automatically generated signatures of relevant personnel. This makes the process much faster than it normally would have been. UniSS is a good product, but I have to convince school administrations to see if they have any use for it, and I am sure a lot of private and government owned Universities do so. I hope the uptake will be encouraging.
We promoted the application in Atlanta, Georgia. We installed it for one of the universities on trial basis. In the United States, there are software applications like that. I take this to countries based on the needs of their schools; we developed the software bearing in mind the needs of the schools here. The software is in the early stage of testing in the American school where it is currently used. The IT people there have analyzed their needs and have been able to identify certain sections that we need to incorporate into the software. Note that it is still at the trial stage and not out in the market yet.
Unique Selling Point
I have over 15 years experience in software development. First, we look at the market when developing software. I used to work for the State of Georgia where I was part of a team that developed Oracle application based Scholarship and Grants System. It is a huge application that was accessed by all the 45 universities in the state of Georgia. That gave us the idea; our target market then became Africa where there is need for such software. However, the design of this system assumes that the university structure is divided into faculties and each is broken down into departments that have degree or diploma programmes. Each faculty’s employees have access to their own faculty’s information, while courses for each department in a faculty will be available in drop down lists based on a student’s registration information and grade level. Only authorized users in a faculty can access a student’s final grade into the system, while approval is required from the head of the faculty to change a student’s final grade – the authorized user can write the approval in the “Comment” field provided. The approval document to change a student’s final grade signed by the faculty head can also be scanned and made available on the application by clicking the “Approval” button. Moreover, there is a “Comment” field available for each student so that each department has the ability to write or update a student’s progress.
